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Good guy, ping!
Posted on 10/10/2004 7:13:10 AM PDT by Max Combined
Runner injured by grenade in Iraq hopes to compete again soon
It was 5 a.m. El Paso time, and Jesus Palomino knew something was terribly wrong.
His son, Air Force Airman Scott Palomino, was calling from overseas.
"Dad, don't worry. I'm OK."
As a greeting, "I'm OK" always means something is wrong.
"Just tell me what's wrong," Jesus Palomino said that April day.
A rocket-propelled grenade had hit Scott's tent at Balad Airbase outside Baghdad.
The explosion tore off most of the 20-year-old airman's left foot as he lay sleeping.
Always an athlete
The news was incomprehensible at first. Scott Palomino was an athlete. He was the boy who grew up playing soccer with his parents, Jesus and Lucia. He was the 7-year-old who loved to run so much that his parents enrolled him in El Paso Wings, a junior track and field league.
He was so eager, so swift, that he went on to run the fastest 800-meter in El Paso while in high school.
Scott Palomino barely had time for despair after the blast. While in Germany awaiting transport to the United States for the amputation, he woke one day to find that his general had sent his roommate and two best friends from his unit in Iraq to visit. Landing in Washington, D.C., Palomino was greeted by his parents and his fiance, Yvette Pedroz.
"I couldn't have done it without all the support," Palomino says, and he credits the pep talks from his dad for his rapid rebound.
Back on his feet
The track star laid claim to being one of the fastest to get up and walk on a prosthesis at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
It took him only 25 days between the time his leg was amputated below the knee to the time he was walking the halls on his prosthesis.
Then he made even bigger strides. The organization Disabled Sports USA brought Palomino and other veterans who are amputees to a camp in California for a week of rock climbing.
Running again
Scrambling uphill was the most natural thing in the world for Palomino. He is shy and soft-spoken but kinetic, lean, muscled, built to move — so much so that even a grenade couldn't limit his natural ability.
Palomino renewed his running after he was transferred in July from Walter Reed to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for physical therapy.
"At first, all I could do was sprint," he says, as if sprinting on a metal leg replacement is a small thing.
He kept trying.
Aching to compete
Now he runs three times a week on school tracks, up to a mile each time, before the prosthesis begins to make his leg sore.
He's been in touch with the coach from the Paralympics, the group that puts on Olympic-style competitions for athletes with disabilities.
The group is thinking about having Palomino join the team to run the 800 meter — nearly a half-mile. That is his sport, his goal, his way of not letting life irrevocably change.
What inner strength. These men should be looked at as heroes, not those prof basketball players that pay women off to have sex with them.
Great, uplifting story. God bless him and all of our soldiers.
Couldn't agree more.
BRAVO Scott!!!
Hand SALUTE!!!!!!
And, Standing O!!!!
THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the SPIRIT of America!!!!
Ping
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Good guy, ping!
Bump
Inspiring story of the resilience of the human spirit.
Hero ~ Bump!
Note to Democrats: Tell this man his loss was because President Bush sent him off to fight a 'WRONG WAR AT THE WRONG TIME IN THE WRONG PLACE' ! ! ! ! !
bump!
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